Klapisch: If only the Yanks' offense was as good as Tanaka's pitching

Brett Gardner watches his third-inning, two-run home run in a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. His homer gave Yankee starter Masahiro some much needed breathing room.

NEW YORK – By now, we all know how lucky the Yankees are to have Masahiro Tanaka (no longer quantifiable) and where they’d be without him (ready for pitchers and catchers in 2015). If you’re looking for more evidence of Tanaka’s brilliance, it was memorialized in a 10-strikeout performance in the Yankees’ 3-1 win over the Blue Jays on Tuesday night.

Tanaka wasn’t just efficient, he was devastating, considering that he was facing the American League’s most lethal home run hitters. The Japanese right-hander allowed Jose Reyes a first-inning, first-pitch blast over the right field wall – and you could hear the uncomfortable murmuring all over the ballpark. But the Jays never came close to cracking the code on Tanaka’s splitter or his secret weapon, the slider.

Tanaka, modest as ever, said, “My stuff wasn’t really very good” and was honest enough to say Reyes’ HR “threw me off a little.” But you would’ve never known, and, besides, the Yankees are hardly complaining. They’re starting a critical, 15-game stretch against the East and desperately need Tanaka to keep flattening everyone in sight.

But here’s the problem. The Yankees have five more games against the division-leading Jays in the next 10 days, and Tanaka isn’t scheduled to start any of them. Instead, the Bombers will rely on their diluted rotation, which wouldn’t necessarily be a death sentence except the offense’s continuing underachievement.

The off-season stimulus plan has, to date, produced an old, fragile lineup that’s on a pace to score 655 runs – no better than in 2013, which was the Yankees’ worst output since the early ’90s.

Joe Girardi has tried a number of tricks and lineup changes, including renewing his faith in Ichiro Suzuki and the phasing out of Alfonso Soriano. But there’s not much of a workaround for Brian McCann (.220) and Carlos Beltran (.218), and as a result the Yankees are second to last in the AL in runs and, even more surprisingly, second to last in runs at home.

“That’s the part I didn’t see coming about [the Yankees]: how dead they’d end up looking at the plate,” said one talent evaluator. “Right now, from what I see, I don’t think of them as playoff team.”

Nothing is impossible, of course, and Tanaka, more than any other Yankee, is capable of raising the organization’s self-esteem on the days he steps on the field. This time, the key to beating the Jays was knowing that they were seeing him for the second time this season, and the right-hander was still able to win a low-scoring game.

Tanaka got 17 swings and misses on his 104 pitches, including nine of the 30s splitters he threw. He wasn’t lying about not having a stellar arsenal, as he lasted only six innings and, perhaps ominously, did not get a single swing-and-miss on any of the 18 fastballs he threw. Still, Girardi’s point was well taken when he said, “Masahiro has won a lot of close games for us, and that tells me something.”

We’ll see whether Tanaka experiences a subtle regression as June gives way to July and August. That’s one reason Girardi wouldn’t let his right-hander go any further than the sixth. He’d struck out the side in the fifth, and stranded Juan Francisco in scoring position in the sixth – at which point Girardi wisely deferred to Dellin Betances in the seventh.

That’s was the manager’s unspoken warning about the heat and the possible corrosive effect that working every fifth day could have on Tanaka. He averaged 92.8 mph on his four-seam fastball, which is in line with his season norm. But the Yankees are already thinking ahead and how to preserve Tanaka for the pennant race.

That is, assuming the Bombers get there. Everything we’ve seen suggests they’ll fall somewhere between 84-88 wins, which would represent only a slight uptick from last season’s 85. It could be enough, but only if the Jays don’t pull away and no one else in the division causes significant damage.

That’s why the next two nights at the Stadium mean so much to the Bombers, because they serve as a billboard of what this team looks like on the non-Tanaka games.

Do you trust Chase Whitley on the mound tonight? How about David Phelps on Thursday? If you think they can hold down Toronto, No. 2 in the AL in runs, then you have every reason to conjure images of September.

But we all know where the summer will decided: As long as CC Sabathia and Michael Pineda remain on the disabled list, the Yankees will live and die with the offense that, for now, looks dead. It’s not a great sign that beating the Jays required a two-run homer from Brett Gardner, and the insurance run was provided by Mark Teixeira’s RBI single in the fifth. This blueprint looks upside down.

No wonder the Jays shrugged off Tanaka’s miniature masterpiece. They couldn’t really hit his splitter, but told themselves: Who really can? The real war begins tonight, when Toronto goes to work on the soft underbelly of the Yankees’ rotation, slots three through five.

This was best put by Reyes himself, who said, “Maybe we’ll get them tomorrow. No Tanaka, so ... .”